Sunnova’s Enronish Ending

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 16, 2025 No Comments

“’The [Sunnova] summit [last November] was really part of the swindle,’ said Chris Pélissié, chief executive at Senga Solar, which is owed more than $680,000 by Sunnova. ‘None of us dealers knew we were playing chess until it was just too late’…” (below)

Previous posts at MasterResource (below) have chronicled the government-enabled rooftop solar industry, which is now in distress. Bankrupt Sunnova Energy heads the list, with others either bankrupt or struggling.

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Examples of Adaptation and Resilience (Part II)

By Terry Anderson and Donald Leal -- July 15, 2025 No Comments

Editor’s Note: This concludes a two-part series with real-world examples of anticipating and ameliorating extreme weather events, a challenge throughout human history. Today’s post was originally published at MR on May 21, 2015.

Yesterday’s post explained how market incentives can address environmental issues, including the believed-to-be negatives of climate change. Prices of inputs and outputs, utilizing resources even if they are subject to the tragedy of the commons, incorporate dynamic environmental changes. Markets, in other words, offer the potential for dynamic responses.

If climate change reduces the productivity of land for wheat production, for example, the price of land will be high relative to its productivity. This generates an incentive for wheat farmers to seek new places for wheat production where land prices are lower. Hence, the 2012 Bloomberg news headline, “Corn Belt Shifts North With Climate as Kansas Crop Dies.”…

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Mining the Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 11, 2025 No Comments

“To turn the noun ‘resources’ into the verb ‘resourcing,’ to discard entirely the notion of a resource ‘glass’ that is somewhere between full and empty, requires one more analytic step—a step that Zimmermann failed to take.”

In 1972, just two years after the first Earth Day, a team of scholars from MIT published a 200-page book called The Limits to Growth. Using the emerging instrument of computer models, they created a worldwide stir by suggesting that science had now put numbers to a few self-evident truths. Non-renewable resources are fixed; the consumption of such resources must eventually end; any civilization based on such consumption must collapse. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis called the work “likely to be one of the most important documents of our age” (January 28, 1972).

Of course, the scholars acknowledged that they were dealing with variables.…

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Power Density: The Key

By Kent Hawkins -- July 9, 2025 No Comments

Editor’s Note: Master Resource’s founder and editor, Rob Bradley, is currently struggling with the aftermath of torrential flooding in the Texas Hill Country. Until he can return to work, he has asked me to post “classic” MR entries. A blog post explaining Vaclav Smil’s concept of “power density” surely qualifies. This is the key concept for understanding a civilization’s energy needs.

Unfortunately, our MR files contain no concise explanation of the concept in layman’s language. (We have many explanations that no conceivable lay reader—myself most definitely included—could possibly understand or appreciate.) The closest thing I could find to a useful journalistic entry was a blog post by Kent Hawkins—a retired electrical engineer in Ontario—published on February 20, 2013. It is reprinted below.—Roger Donway, Managing Editor.

Power Density Separates the Wheat from the Chaff

By Kent Hawkins — February 20, 2013

“Power density (W/m2) is perhaps the most revealing variable in energetics…”[1]- Vaclav Smil

It may be a bit of an exaggeration to say that understanding power density may be all the average person requires to put our energy sources and needs into perspective, but there is some merit in this argument.…

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Energy: The Master Resource (by Robert L. Bradley Jr. and Richard W. Fulmer)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 8, 2025 No Comments Continue Reading

Energy & Environmental Review: July 7, 2025

By -- July 7, 2025 No Comments Continue Reading

Competitive Solar? A Perennial Deceit (Enron/NYT in 1994)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- July 1, 2025 1 Comment Continue Reading

Solar Tax Credits: 1978–2025 (never enough)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- June 30, 2025 1 Comment Continue Reading

Climate Exchange with Jean Boissinot: For the Record

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- June 26, 2025 2 Comments Continue Reading

IRA Cronies: American Clean Power Association, et al.

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- June 25, 2025 3 Comments Continue Reading